Please Don't Suck Dragon Age: Inquisition

Seriously, please don’t! I absolutely loved Dragon Age: Origins. It was one of the best RPG's I've ever played & gave me copious amounts of replay. Its story, characters and gameplay made it an insanely fun and in-depth game to play. With mods added in, you could almost never have the same game twice. Origins was one of those games that would transport you to a different world and one that you'd end up playing for hours and not even realize it.

... and then came Dragon Age 2. Let me first preface this 'review' of Dragon Age 2 with the fact that I was never able to finish the game. By the time I got to playing it, the deluge of bad reviews and comments had already corrupted my view of the game and no matter what I did I always thought of the bad. This post will simply be me reflecting on my views and other people's views of DA:2.

It's widely known that the main reason DA:2 was so bad was because it was rushed through to production. They did not have enough time to expand the story, create new areas or even do some quality bug testing. Bioware/EA saw the huge success that Origins was and wanted to push out a game to make some more money.

Although I'm happy that the main character finally could talk (Hawke is pretty cool btw) the negatives for DA:2 definitely outweighed the positives. If you had played the game then would probably would have noticed a few things seemed 'off' with it:

SCREW EVERYTHING ABOUT MAGES- Seriously, the entire game seemed to be about how everyone hated mages. I understand the game needs a plot, but Jesus....go easy on Harry Potter. While everyone is busy hating mages, you could be busy running around in the mage outfit and slicing your wrist performing blood magic and NO ONE SAYS ANYTHING. It's clear though, that your decisions at the end of the game will factor into decisions for Inquisition, even though the ending is pretty much the same for each.

There seem to be only a few different places in the whole game- Dragon Age: Origins had a very well designed and open world with many different environments. There were a bunch of different cities and within those cities, many different areas. DA:2 seemed to have one GIANT city that you could visit during the nighty & day and a few other little areas outside of town. I do have to say I did like the idea of areas having different events and a different feel during day/night but don't make this your basis for a 'different area'. The dungeons and caves also seemed to repeat themselves about a few missions. It just felt like a copy-paste game.

In order to see more information about the disdain for the game, I'd honestly just Google it so you can see different reviews and discussions.

I do not mean to say it is a bad game, there are efinitley some merits and good points. Though in this instance, the bad points outweight the good.

Inquisition

So far, Dragon Age: Inquisition looks like a beautiful love child between the first Dragon Age and Skyrim. It has the original feel of Origins with the huge openness of Skyrim with some insanely beautiful graphics rendered by Frostbite 3 to support it. They have refined the UI and combat to allow different kinds of gameplay. You can dive right into a battle and mash away at your abilities, or you can meticulously plan out each move and have set tactics for every kind of encounter. You would definitely have to play or watch/know what happens in the past games to be able to fully understand what Inquisition is about. While I would recommend playing the games to experience them and really understand the story, they have introduced a service known as Dragon Age Keep that allows you to make a complete game experience to import into Inquisition. As stated in the FAQ, Keep is exactly a:

Within the Dragon Age Keep, you’ll be able to customize a Dragon Age historical world state to your exact specifications drawn from Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II story decisions. These include hero attributes, companion details, quest results, and more. Customize as much or as little as you wish. Then you'll be able to import your saved world state into Dragon Age Inquisition at the start of a new game. For new players, the Keep will serve as a great way to understand the people, places, and events that shaped the world leading up toDAI.

Keep is going to be an amazing tool that'll allow people to make any kind incoming game possible. This will definitely make it easier to customize a game to import into Inquisition. You'll probably spend a decent amount of time in Keep JUST customizing your game.

With everything that happened with DA:2, the amount of time they put into it and what I've seen, Inquisition looks like it is going to be one amazing game. It'll be able to cater to all kinds of players while still having the soul of a Dragon Age game.

I have embedded some videos below so you can see for yourself what the game looks like. Once the release date comes closer, I’ll post more about the game!